In 1963 the American journalist Betty Friedan published her book The Feminine Mystique, in which she identified, on the basis of an analysis of women's magazines and surveys of women, a paradox in the self- awareness of American women: in striving to achieve the ideal of femininity, they devote themselves zealously to serving the family, and at the same time they feel they are "different" human beings from men, who have access to the world at large. Friedan compared the situation (...) of the housewife with the situation of a prisoner in a concentration camp. In both, a person is deprived of self-identity, of self-respect, and of manifesting one's individuality and is isolated from the large world of ideas and events. Friedan's general conclusion was that the ideal of "femininity" that guides women is not a natural bent of their natures but an inhumane stereotype that is imposed by advertising, business, and government because it is useful to society. (shrink)

A desire to total up the results of the development of philosophical thought in the 20th century, to analyze the respects in which it has been distinctive, its successes and failures, has become clearly manifest in the bourgeois literature of the past two decades. There is nothing surprising in that fact as such. The mid-20th century is a chronological landmark of sufficient importance to impel thinkers to look behind them and give thought to the path they have traversed, while World (...) War II and the cleavage of the world into two systems were trials of sufficient seriousness to compel a new look not only at the political but the intellectual history of the first half of this century. The fact that Marxism has become the most important factor in the entire ideological life of the contemporary world has destroyed the academic calm of bourgeois philosophy and compelled Western thinkers to undertake a review of their intellectual arsenal. (shrink)

A retrospective look at the history of the Institute of Philosophy and reflection on philosophy in Russia in the Soviet period "through the eyes of a historian of philosophy accustomed to survey work." Speaking of the strengths and weaknesses of contemporary Russian philosophical thought in comparison with its English-language counterpart, the author points to two disturbing tendencies that are still dominant in Russian philosophy: the prevailing "descriptive" analysis rather than "reflective" and "analytic" investigations; and the insufficient development of controversy, which (...) gives the discussion a conformist character and does not stimulate originality of thought. Only through renouncing the traditional model of education and establishing a new educational paradigm may these problems be effectively solved. (shrink)

One of the most important theoretical and ideological tasks of Marxist philosophy is the critical study of the philosophical thought of the West. In the second half of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s, the ideological struggle on the international arena entered a new stage. It was characterized by the turn of the forces of imperialist reaction away from the politics of detente to the politics of the "cold war," to the active opposition to the forces of peace, democracy, (...) and socialism. The struggle of ideas has swung back and forth in the context of, on the one hand, a resurgence of reactionary anticommunist tendencies, and the stimulation and expansion of antimilitary movements and the struggles of the peoples for peace and socialism on the other. (shrink)